So, a few Treo pictures of the new office. Week one was a success. I’m getting absolutely no guidance so have to jump in with both feet and figure this out. That’s a touch intimidating but off I go. I have this whole empty credenza top so must buy more frames! Emay’s delightful green leather frame with C, E, L monograms is there with me as well as several pictures of Grace & Whit.
Reading Cookie last night I came upon an article about that most tired of chestnuts, the work-life balance topic … ostensibly a review of several of the latest books on the topic, the writer makes some observations that I can’t get out of my head. I suppose in a week in which I’m reveling in being AWAY from the home and the children they feel salient:
“Women have been granted more freedom, both in the workplace and in marriage, and now we must make our myriad decisions and live with the guilty consequences. Perhaps this is our generation’s feminine mystique. As a result, we can count on a fine tremor of nervous discontent running through so many mothers’ lives, a queasy feeling that somehow somewhere someone is doing a better job of pulling it all off. Perhaps this is why many of these manifestos are so extreme … buried within the rhetoric, though, is a persistent truth: we are desperate for answers.”
“Once, when I was in my mid-20s, living on my own, childless, and still unaware that adulthoood would eventually require life-defining compromise, my boyfriend asked me if I was a feminist. ‘Well,’ I stalled, ‘actually I think I’m something newer.'”
“I crave a narrative that captures the woolly contradictions without having to shoehorn them into a tidy thesis. [the novel] should be required reading alongside the nonfiction tomes about work-life balance. Together they paint a vivid picture of the impossible upheaval of motherhood and our eternal grasp for resolution.”
“The experience of motherhood is unwieldy…Navigating it requires a vigilant and, at times, lonely sense of self.”
“Friedan herself said it best when autographing her first reader copy of The Feminine Mystique: “Courage to us all on the new road.”